Once again, CBS has inexplicably and pointlessly failed to reveal the jury’s votes following a Survivor finale. While CBS.com’s Voting History has been updated, it does not show the jury’s votes.

Interestingly, the show’s winner, Yul, told Entertainment Weekly that he is “not 100 percent positive” who voted for him. However, he says, “My guess on my side? I think I had Jonathan, Candice, Sundra, Brad, and Adam, and Ozzy had Rebecca, Parvati, Nate, and Jenny.”

Ozzy tells ASAP’s The Slug that he thinks the deciding vote was Sundra, who voted for Yul, even though Ozzy says “I thought she was going to [vote for me], and I thought we had a special bond. So that was a little disappointing.” He also says that “maybe some people have a small amount of regret after seeing the way I played and not just hearing my explanation through the jury. That’s what it came down to for a lot of people because I didn’t have a relationship with most of them. … I think I spent too much time fishing and not enough time politicking.”

Yul also reveals in multiple interviews that there was not really a possibility that he’d give the hidden immunity idol to Becky, even though the editing suggested otherwise. Yul tells EW that they “very quickly decided that it was the wrong thing to do. We didn’t think for ethical and strategic reasons that it made sense. … She’d get to the final three, but there was no way she’d win because people would see her as not deserving.”

And speaking of editing, Yul says that, while “the show is very authentic,” the incident with Jonathan’s hat was evidence of “manipulation” that upset him. He says, “I asked the crew at tribal council and even before I left the island, please give this to Jonathan. At one point they said yes, but then left to have an hour-long discussion, and then came back and said, ‘You want to give him the hat, go ahead.’ … I put it on the jury box before the jury came in so no one would know and then Probst says, ‘Yul makes this bold power play!’ I was like, what?”

He also says that he confronted Jeff Probst about it, and said the jury didn’t know it was him until Probst brought it up, and the editors “cut all that stuff out. The truth of the matter is, even if I knew Jonathan or anyone in the game would have voted against me, I still would have gotten him the hat. There’s no reason to be mean about it.”

about Andy Dehnart

Andy Dehnart is a journalist who has covered reality television for more than 15 years and created reality blurred in 2000. A member of the Television Critics Association, his writing and criticism about television, culture, and media has appeared on NPR and in Playboy, Buzzfeed, and many other publications. Andy, 37, also directs the journalism program at Stetson University in Florida, where he teaches creative nonfiction and journalism. He has an M.F.A. in nonfiction writing and literature from Bennington College. More about reality blurred and Andy.

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